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Updated: May 4, 2025
This made Lefebvre's force available to strengthen further the army which still lay behind the Passarge. Napoleon again offered Silesia to Francis, this time entire and outright, as the price of an alliance; he was even willing to make an exchange for Dalmatia.
Stern necessity would wait no longer on Napoleon's bravado; in a few days his troops withdrew to the tableland behind the river Passarge. There they found better cantonments, but the food was neither better nor more abundant. The Emperor had only a thatched hovel for his headquarters at Osterode, and, as he wrote to his brother Joseph, lived in snow and filth, without wine, brandy, or bread.
Bennigsen had by that time about ninety thousand men, excluding the Prussians, who now numbered eighteen thousand. By his delay he had lost the services of his best ally, the inclement weather; but he had at least come to a decision, and forestalling Napoleon's scheme, advanced on June sixth to the Passarge, against Ney's corps, which was the French advance-guard.
But, falling in with Bernadotte near the River Passarge, his progress was checked and his design revealed. At once Napoleon prepared to march northwards and throw the Russians into the sea, a plan which in its turn was foiled by the seizure of a French despatch by Cossacks.
Danzig surrendered to the French on May the 24th, and Neisse in Silesia a little later; and it was not till the besiegers of these fortresses came up to swell the French host that Bennigsen opened the campaign. He was soon to rue the delay. His efforts to drive the foe from the River Passarge were promptly foiled, and he retired in haste to his intrenched camp at Heilsberg.
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